Personality & Worldview Review

Personality And Worldview By J. H. Bavinck

Personality And Worldview By J. H. Bavinck

Synopsis:

Johan Herman Bavinck examines the relationship between the soul, each human’s unique personality, and worldview. It’s dangerous when a worldview is misapplied but also dangerous is the person who doesn’t acknowledge his or her worldview – especially the Christian who is able to be justified in knowledge through their Christian worldview.

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Review

It’s interesting to read presuppositional apologetic topics pre-1970s. Cornelius Van Til was writing around 1950s and usually (before the 2000s) you really needed a decade or two before people started interacting with the subject well enough (one could argue that’s needed these days as well).

Here, Bavinck isn’t so much a presuppositionalist per se, but a lot of this book has a number of elements that will be familiar to those in the presup camp. First of all the translation and the explanation of the translation is top notch. Reasons givens for choices and inclusions or editing are made right off the bat and more translated works could use this type of rigor. I applaud James Eglinton for it.

Bavinck starts where I believe all people should start and that’s defining his terms. Worldview, personality, and worldvision are his starting points and descriptions of them are the necessary lifeblood in understanding where he’s coming from and the points he’s trying to make. Here, I think many VanTil/Bahnsen presuppositionalists will find useful the distinction between “worldvision” and “worldview” and it’s something to ponder. What Bavinck looks at when it comes to personality is something I was excited to read about and it is where I think the book falters the most as he doesn’t really come back to this part and leaves it underdeveloped and focuses more on the worldvision/worldview components.

The proceeding chapters cover the gamut of philosophical revolutions and eras – empiricism, rationalism, mysticism, East/West divide, and atheistic materialism are laid out in depth. In fact, I would say there’d be no way to charge Bavinck with surface-level undertaking of the topics in such a small amount of space.

However, I do think Bavinck gets too caught up in informing his audience of these worldviews that the personality – the bridging between worldvision and worldview is almost lost in the pages. Even in the last chapter where I thought he might tie everything together, while I would have made for a messy display, wasn’t done and again it’s as if Bavinck only cooked one side of the pancake.

I think this is a worthwhile book to have on the topic of different worldviews, especially from the time period in which Bavinck is writing. I don’t think you are given what the title suggests by half but I think this is something presuppositionalists could use as a springboard to talk about how personality forms the bridge between worldvision into a worldview – even if one were to claim to have never formed one before.

Final Grade

C-